The inevitable challenges of researching politicized subjects
Here's the start of a twitter thread:
This is an amazing and important story from @WStoneReports: hydroxychloroquine is unproven as a treatment for COVID-19. Which means it needs study. But because President Trump publicly promoted it, some people are reluctant to study it. @MorningEdition @NPR
— Steve Inskeep (@NPRinskeep) May 20, 2020
My general approach to Trump is to mostly ignore him, basically taking Zeynep Tufekci's approach here that most people looking for alternate credible sources of information know to disregard him. Yet what should one do when a potential therapy - which I certainly don't think should be embraced to the extent that Trump has - still seems to be worth some evaluation?
It seems worth noting the fairly-well-known-now case of the guy who died after ingesting some aquarium cleaner made of the stuff, but often ignored is that there seems to be more to that story than meets the eye. i.e. this seems to appear in context of abuse1, possibly being an escalation of violence there rather than innocent idiocy.
TL;DR, the fish tank cleaner guy wasn't "idiot misinterprets president's medical advice" but probably "long-standing pattern of domestic violence escalates to murder"https://t.co/HklMZN72B2
— Rogue Works Progress Admı̇nistration (@GabrielRossman) April 24, 2020
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This is of course the sort of domestic violence case that those who claim to care about domestic violence generally seem to prefer to try to ignore or even suppress - i.e. male victim. ↩︎